Some revisionists tend to negatively re-evaluate key characters of Italian national unity, such as Camillo Benso di Cavour, Giuseppe Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel II of Savoy.
A prime example was the writer Alfredo Oriani, which put into question the outcome of the events of the Risorgimento in his work The political struggle in Italy (1892), which examined the conflict between federalism and unitarianism.
Criticisms against the interpretation of the Risorgimento events were also moved by Francesco Saverio Nitti, who in his works North and South (Nord e Sud)(1900) and Italy at the dawn of the twentieth century (L'Italia all'alba del secolo XX) (1901), analyzed the consequences of the national Unity from a framework illustrating the political and economic situation in the pre-unification states.
In his book Prison Notebooks (Quaderni del carcere), published posthumously only after 1947, he describes the Risorgimento as a "passive revolution" suffered by the peasants, the poorest social class of the population.
The growth of this cultural movement, in particular measure across the last fifty years, has generated the emergence of a growing critical literature of the broader historiography, which has gradually been the subject of increasingly acute dispute and controversy.
[2] In the years following the annexation of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies to the newborn Italian State, contemporary witnesses gave the prints the first works that brought a critical analysis of the political unification of the peninsula.
In 1861 he published his first historical essay Italy and its political drama in 1861 (L'Italia e il suo dramma politico nel 1861), in which he judged the unification process as elitist and distant from the interests of the people, led by gun violence and the spread of lies.
The thought of de' Sivo was long the subject of ostracism, in spite of Benedetto Croce had highlighted his thickness as a scholar by writing a biography that was included in the work A family of patriots (Una famiglia di patrioti).
For a description of the events from his point of view Buttà resorted to a cutting language and a tone more sarcastic than de' Sivo's, also sparing no criticism against the Bourbon officers whom he accused of cowardice or treason against the crown.
The changed political conditions allowed the emergence of a group of scholars which began re-examining the value of the House of Savoy work, and made largely negative reviews in that respect.
In keeping with its 19th-century precursors, according to Alianello, the choices made in the unification process, as well as being totally alien to the needs of the Southern Italy, have been performed by the Piedmontese, with the complicity of the British government and masonry for the purpose of mere foreign occupation.
Along the same cultural lines of Alianello and Topa, the Calabrian writer considered Italy as the result of an operation of military conquest and economic damage to the South against which it would have been put in place an intricate plot.
Among them we can mention Lorenzo Del Boca, Gigi Di Fiore, Francesco Mario Agnoli, Pino Aprile, Fulvio Izzo, Massimo Viglione, Antonio Ciano, Aldo Servidio, Roberto Martucci, Luciano Salera and Pier Giusto Jaeger.
In particular, Garibaldi was called "moderate empirical and non-revolutionary", "cautious" and "statesman" and Cavour was severely criticized, being defined "dishonest", "awkward", "wrong", "clever" and stressing that he was determined to prevent the unification of Italy if there was any possibility that the merit of it could be attributed to radical, republican, democratic or popular forces.
A distinctly different opinion was expressed by the scholar against Mazzini in the biography he dedicated to him, where the Italian thinker was positively judged because of the impulse given to the democratic life of the 19th century, with particular reference to the campaigns in favor of social security, universal suffrage and women's rights.
In his work "The force of destiny – history of Italy from 1796 to today", Duggan expressed strong criticisms of the most popular historiography, with particular reference to the interpretation of the anti-unification movements in the South and of their repression.
In particular, he reports that already in occasion of the massacre of Pontelandolfo and Casalduni voices like the one of the Deputy Giuseppe Ferrari, who called what happened a real "civil war" were abruptly silenced, since according to the official interpretation "the "banditry" was responsible for violence in southern Italy and no one else".
According to the English scholar, the governments of the period after 1861 were obliged to represent the furious fighting that occurred in the former territories of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies as solely related to the common crime, as any other interpretation would have clashed sharply with the results of the "plebiscites" which spoke instead of a population unanimously in favor of unity.
Duggan also said that efforts to credit the official version were blatantly contradicted by the facts since in 1864, no fewer than 100,000 soldiers (half of the entire Italian Army) were deployed in the South in an attempt to respond to rising.
The historian reported that statements about the barbarism, ignorance, immorality, superstition, laziness and cowardice of the southern inhabitants were contained in numerous writings and records of the time, and that the same Cavour wrote in this regard that the South was corrupt "to the core".
Over all, it is remembered the event involving the eminent Piedmontan General Giuseppe Govone, which was sent to Sicily with the task of rounding up conscripts and used of methods such as "putting cities under siege, cutting water supply and the kidnapping of women and children."
Duggan turns his critical attention also to the construction of the mythology of the Risorgimento, as defined through the words of Francesco Crispi "religion of the country (which we need to give) the greatest solemnity, the maximum popularity".
British historian believes that the idealization of the unified movement was consciously pursued through the exaltation of the figures of Vittorio Emanuele II and Garibaldi, as a catalyst and homogenization of the various and often conflicting, monarchical and republican, federal and unitary, conservative and radicals trends.
The British also recognized that academic scholars of the Southern School (Meridionalisti, see specific paragraph) have shown that the society of the ancient Kingdom of Two Sicilies was not stagnant, and some institutions strongly disputed by mainstream historians, such as estate, were not an index of socio-cultural backwardness but rather the "most appropriate response to the technological conditions and market circumstances".